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How to avoid the plague
The protective clothing worn by a 17th-century plague physician. Etching by Paulus Furst of Nuremberg, Germany, 1656. Illustration from Bettmann/Corbis
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Franco Mormando is an associate professor of Italian at Boston College and originator and cocurator of
Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500–1800,
which will open at the Worcester Art Museum on April 3, 2005. This essay is drawn from the exhibition catalogue.
Many Italian plague-themed paintings from the early modern period (1500–1800) invite the viewer to meditate on death and final judgment. This meditation, along with prayer, repentance, and charity, were spiritual remedies commonly prescribed by ecclesiastical authorities in time of plague. Temporal remedies were also recommended, of course, including pills, poultices, and potions offered by doctors, pharmacists, superstitious healers, and practitioners of folkloric medicine.
But after centuries of experience with plague, early modern Italians had arrived at the conclusion that the only sure form of protection came neither from divine or human agents, but from the practice of removing oneself from sources of contagion, fleeing infected or possibly infected people, objects, homes, and towns. "Save your money and don't bother with the remedies of the
fisici
for they are worthless," advises the 17th-century Florentine librarian-scholar Francesco Rondinelli; while his contemporary, the Roman physician Giovanni Pressi, is obliged to admit that no sure treatment for plague can be identified. Another librarian-scholar, Lodovico Muratori, writes in his
Del governo della peste,
published in Modena in 1714, that most people made recourse to "the pill of the three adverbs" . . .
"Mox, longe, tarde"
as "the most certain and effective remedy and prophylactic known." That is to say that most people, when confronted by an outbreak of plague, followed the collective wisdom that counseled "flee immediately"
(cede mox),
"stay far away"
(recede longe),
and "be late in returning"
(redi tarde).
Not all the inhabitants of an infected city or town had either the means to flee or a suitably isolated, secure place to which to flee, and those who stayed behind had to endure a stringent regime of quarantine. City gates were closed to all but certifiably safe traffic; letters were hung on racks above braziers and fumigated with wood smoke; public assemblies were prohibited; bonfires were lit to "cleanse" the air; homes in which persons had died of the plague (or were suspected to have died of it) were placed under immediate quarantine; streets, buildings, clothing, and other contaminated surfaces were "disinfected" with vinegar or sulfur or set on fire; beggars and prostitutes were rounded up and confined to hospices for the duration of the epidemic; and dogs were massacred as suspected spreaders of the contagion. In Florence, during the 1630 pandemic, women and children were forbidden to leave home unless they could afford to travel in a sealed carriage. Giovanni Baldinucci, an eyewitness, noted that this regulation "greatly afflicts the [impoverished] women who in hot weather suffer house confinement and deplore this partiality." In Rome, the unfortunate residents of an entire neighborhood, Trastevere, where the first cases of plague erupted in 1656, found themselves literally walled in overnight by the authorities in a (failed) attempt to prevent the contagion from spreading to the rest of the city.
These remedies were bitterly resented and resisted by the people they were meant to protect. However, no "remedy" provoked more resistance than forced confinement to the
lazzaretto,
the public plague "hospital" where victims of the plague (or suspected victims) were sent to recover or, the more likely case, to die. The lazzaretti—dirty, malodorous, overcrowded, crime-ridden, unrelievedly wretched—inspired terror. Pressi, who spent many days serving in the lazzaretti of Rome, confessed to diarist Carlo Cartari that he was:
shocked and amazed that people in Rome could actually be laughing, much less playing music and singing, for if they stayed in [a lazzaretto] for just one day, they would come out very different people and would not feel like laughing any more. . . . All the babies sent there died; at times they were fed goat's milk with sugar to quiet them at night because they cried continuously, while the wailing of the women, who had lost loved ones, pierced one's heart with compassion.
Muratori, who offers one of the most vivid descriptions of the lazzaretti and their horrors, tells us that they were often run "by people of little or no charity . . . with horrible faces, bizarre dress, and frightening voices," and that the mere thought of being sent there caused people to fall into a "passione straordinaria d'animo." And for early modern Italians, there was reason to dread that response itself. As Girolamo Gastaldi, Pope Alexander VII's commissioner of health during the Roman outbreak of 1656, wrote, and as was generally believed, "Even the imagination merely frightened by the plague is enough to bring on the disease."
Franco Mormando
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